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The King is Dead

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Kindred of the East

Surprise, surprise! I’m going to be running a Kindred of the East chronicle!

There was an abrupt demand for a modern and/or horror game
on the roundtable for our RPG group, so the 5e D&D game was suddenly
cancelled and I was voluntold that I should run a KotE game. I was a bit
frustrated with the D&D game (as I have recorded elsewhere) and I’ve always
wanted to run Kindred of the East, so
I’m not exactly unhappy with this development.

(On the other hand, I really, really like 5e. Are there any
players in the San Antonio, TX area looking for a DM interested more in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser-style adventuring
and less in Dragonlance-style
world-saving?)

For those who don’t know, Kindred of the East was the flagship product of White Wolf’s 1998 “Year
of the Lotus” series of supplements for the original World of Darkness. It
presented alternate rules for running vampires in Asia – rules that varied so
greatly from the basic rules for western vampires that eastern vampires are
practically a completely different type of monster – and developed the Asian half of the setting in
greater detail. The line was expanded into a series of companions and splat
books developing the equivalent of the clans for KotE and Asian-themed
alternates for the other OWoD product lines.

Kindred of the East
is also an infamous mess. The Asian vampires or kuei-jin (a portmanteau of the
Chinese word for “demon” and the Japanese suffix for “people”) have what is
probably the messiest, most complicated character sheet in the entire
Storyteller System. They have three separate mana pools (Demon Chi, Yang Chi, and
Yin Chi) to track, plus hero points (Willpower), a feng shui-inspired
Direction, and two separate personality tracks (Hun Soul and P’o Soul). They
can learn Disciplines like vampires, learn Rites and buy magical artifacts and
spirit mentors like werewolves, and one of their souls is trying to kill the
other like wraiths. On top of that, the fluff of the system is an Orientalist mélange
of Chinese and Japanese concepts with a seasoning of other Asian cultures just
to confuse matters.

(The mish-mash of cultures intrigued me when I bought these
books in the first few years after they came out. Seventeen years later, I
suspect I actually know more now about Chinese and Japanese folklore than the writers
of this product line did then, and it kind of bugs me. It’s not necessarily the
writers’ fault – a lot more Asian pop culture has made its way stateside since
then – but it still feels kind of insensitive.)

If I was wise, I’d adapt the material to some streamlined,
modern game system like Savage Worlds. Doing so would make the game much easier
to run and easier to improvise within. I am not wise, so I’m going to try to
run the chronicle using the original, horrible rules. In my defense, several of
my players own the rules as well and are already building characters using
those rules. Changing systems on those players would actually make it harder
for them to contribute. However, I am going to go way out of my way to avoid
making up any new NPCs or monsters; the pre-generated characters in the various
supplements are going to see a lot of renaming and reuse.

That last site will help me temper my expectation. Given
that I’ve waited over a decade and a half to play this game, I have unrealistic
hopes of a truly epic campaign. Ideally, the new chronicle will be very
grotesque and horrific, very much in the vein of anime such as Ninja Scroll and Wicked City
that inspired KotE’s creation. I expect that in practice, though, I’ll wind up
veering more into action-humor like Inuyasha or Nura: Rise of
the Yokai Clan. At worst, it might turn into Hozuki’s
Coolheadedness. (Honestly, any and all of the above would be entertaining
to me, but my players’ mileage may vary.)

I’d love to start the characters in the Kamakura shogunate
setting of Blood & Silk, the Dark Ages supplement for Kindred of the East, and then jump them
forward into the Bakumatsu
(as seen in Sunset Empires) and
finally into the modern age. Character advancement is so slow and weird in OWoD
games that it really drives me nuts. Being able to really explore characters’
advancement in their Dharmas while the world sinks into the Fifth Age would be much
more entertaining to me than just watching a bunch of running monkeys flail
about. Heck, I’ve got a copy of Time of
Judgment I could put to use if we did the centuries-spanning chronicle (and
maybe we could work in some flashbacks to Exalted,
too!).

*Sigh*

Actually, I know we’ll all get fidgety long before we slay
the Demon Emperor, so I should just prepare myself for a raucous ruckus of
monsters being horrible to each other. The grotesquery of Kindred of the East makes it hard to take seriously for too long
anyway. I mean, Ninja Scroll is one
of its influences; I don’t think you’re actually meant to take it too
seriously.

PWYW For This Thing We Wrote!

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